Currently crowdfunding, this tabletop RPG cross card game is a Slavic and Baltic-inspired storytelling game of making difficult choices as weird and wonderful characters, set in the strange, magical world of Zorovna.
While there aren't many storytelling games on our best card games list, this one could be a contender for a storytelling category on our best board games guide. I've seen a lot of storytelling games in my time, and this one really seems to master the art of drawing the story to a logical conclusion, as opposed to letting it drag on for time immemorial as some do.
That's become clear as I've sat watching Zhenya's Wonder Tales actual play on the Third Floor Wars YouTube channel. In it, I've been given a taste of just one of the stories available among the 135 cards included. A story that will seem rather familiar to Baldur's Gate 3 players who took a liking to the wild sweetheart Halsin – a great representation of poly folk in video games, if you ask me. Bully Pulpit Games has leaned a bit more into the dramatic side of sharing partners, with some very high-intensity arguments around babies with unknown fathers ensuing throughout play.
The game works like this: Players are given the option to journey through six different stories playing as anything from a prince or an orphan, to a werewolf of monster hunter. Each story is made up of 22 drama-fuelled cards that are laid out in a 5x4 grid. As the story unfolds, the cards are flipped each time you take progressively more intense actions, propelling the story with revelations and choices that are great for keeping things fresh. You move through scenes from the outer cards, toward a central point that will see the narrative come to an exciting end.
From the mind of Jason Morningstar, the game comes from his fascination with central and eastern European folktales. "I like their cruelty and pragmatism," Morningstar noted in a recent Backerkit post, "their way of handling the strange and sublime that presages magical realism. I like the way they view animals, and things that might not exactly be animals."
Coming with its own cloth map of Zorovna that's just dying to get tea-stained, the box is a lovely magnetically closing, pocket-sized package that you can take around and set up to tell tales alone or with friends, wherever you go.
If all that sounds like something that would interest you – I know it does me as designer of my own storytelling game – you can head on over to the Backerkit page and back Zhenya's Wonder Tales right now for as little as $12 for the digital version, or $30 for print and digital.
For more recommendations, why not check out the best cooperative board games or best two player board games?
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